December 2006 Archives

Just like every other average jane out there I am low on blog due to what seems to be "that time of year". Ok, granted some of you are so faithful to the daily writ that I am in awe of your commitment. For me, the lack of blog is an indication of things more pressing and that I am less organized than I would like to be.

Big surprise there.

Lots of thoughts have been tripping across my brain of late considering worthy news items that need poking fun at, or the normal cultural holiday misunderstandings that inevitably rear their ugly head this time of year... so much fodder for the blog.

But instead I am shifting into overdrive to do all the mundane things that must be done before the fun things. Like eating your broccoli before dessert, I am doing... business books, laundry, dusting, prelim packing, wrapping, cleaning out the fridge, more laundry, addressing envelopes, blah blah... you get the idea. It is probably similar at your house too.

The wretched part of it is that yesterday the UPS truck finally delivered my HUGE shipment from CheapJoes.com. So I have sitting in my studio a years supply of different sizes of crisp white virgin, waiting-to-be-painted... canvas.

sigh.

And, just like I advise all my artist friends, I DO have a place all set up on a perpetual basis in order to pick up a brush on a whim. But today it just sort of taunts me.

There are other things to do.

But the happy side is the anticipation of travel and seeing family. Daniel is home from MICA, Bryan will be taking time off, and we will all soon be off to the desert to visit family and spend time together and get a little rest to help gear up for 07.

We could all use the break.

I began this last year and walked away from it. I recently was prompted to add it to the thin places series (which continues to grow in spite of my thinking that I was done, this proves to be untrue) by adding the grid and portals. The idea of visually depicting the "other"(spiritual) realm continues to fascinate me. Our real tangible world is always intersecting with the spiritual and here again the portals are punching through while these two women support each other in the act of sacred prayer (swirling around them).

In my exploration of the place where art intersects with the spirit I have in the last few months opened a door in me that has allowed me to put deep feelings into paint. It is just an exercise for me to not intellectualize or try to illustrate how I feel but simply connect with the sensation and see what happens. The first one took me by surprise, in fact it utterly ambushed me. It was a few weeks after Daniel had gone off to college and I was experiencing some strong feelings of separation in spite of telling myself how silly it was to feel this way. The only thing that gave me a sense of comfort was painting in red. I don't remember if I blogged on this at the time, but I know I didn't post the painting because frankly it didn't photograph well, and it was after all, just feelings spilled out in paint. Akin to Julie Cameron's morning pages exercise, only in paint. If you have read her book "The Artist's Way" she strongly encourages never to show anyone your morning pages.

But I am continuing to try to honor this new awareness so I am going to start to post my explorations of this (in spite of Cameron's advice). In no way do I feel that these are "real art" but what is that anyway? Maybe it is and there is just so much more work that needs to happen in me to acknowledge that. It is all process and that is what I am focusing on. Soul work as my friend Jen puts it. It resides on a very subconscious level.

Red (or Separation) Even though this was prompted by feelings of loss, when I look at it now it makes me really happy. I have no idea why.

This next one I painted on Nov. 28th. I was having very intense feelings of personal failure as well as a strong sense that there was a "strange disturbance in the force" ;-). That is a silly way to express what is a feeling of foreboding that I sometimes get that involves the perception that a loved one or someone that I care about is struggling. This sensation tends to be a prayer prompter. In this I felt a pressure, or oppression. It was even difficult to breath.

Soul Struggle

The idea of observing advent (or even knowing what it was) is a pretty recent thing for our family. The problem with alot of rituals that even have a whiff of christmas "holiday" on them jerks me right out of the meaning and into some sort of sugar plum fairy-land where all good christian girls and boys get nintendo from Jesus dressed like santa. It all gets mixed up into the swill of the large church/macy production mentality that I think this year (finally) I can step back from and see through. Wanting to create something that was thought provoking but not in a way that the cheezy christmas carols piped in at the grocery store is (in shopping for thanksgiving turkey this phenomenon nearly drove Bryan batty) I came up with this.

The wood came from an old barn that I used to play in as a child. The Crown was something I had gotten (from the holy land) as a prop for a series of easter photos that I produced two seasons ago. And the candles were as far away from the traditional looking wreath candles as possible. Assembling it was easy, but I have to admit the crown pierced the purple candle pretty bad when I put it on which was thought provoking in itself. This visual reminder on our table will hopefully allow us to look past the birth onto the sacrifice while still celebrating it.

So this first day of advent with Daniel home for the weekend, he lit the candle, Bryan prayed and we shared a celebratory meal of duck. This contrasted in such a funny way to last week's thanksgiving meal in which the size of the poultry by nature screams "excess". I think I was more genuinely thankful for the duck because of what this meal represented. (Ok so it isn't really fasting, but at least the focus isn't on christmas shopping).;-)

One in the series of the crown of thorns imagery...